The power of rituals

When I think of rituals, it gives me a peaceful feeling. It gives me a feeling of knowing that they will support me living my ideal day. Help me what it is that I would like to experience on a daily basis.
A key benefit of having rituals in place, is that they are there because you choose to. You can wake up every morning and having an internal dialogue with yourself if you will do your meditation or not. If you are too tired or are too busy. A ritual is there out of self-love. Out of self-support because you know you will just have a better day with them in place. And that is so important because then you have to think about it every day. You can hear that voice but you just say “thank you, but I will do it anyway”. Just because you choose to.

What can a ritual bring you? Rituals are anchors through your day. We all have a need for certainty and uncertainty in our life. When you know you live a life with lots of movements, lots of moments of stress that can arise that can make you feel that you are not in control, the balance between certainty and uncertainty can be out of place. The level of stress can be higher than you would like it to be and that influences your kindness towards others and yourself. You might wake up with a kid yelling in your ear and this tends to go on until the kids are in bed. Or you pick up your phone straight away to read your work emails and stay in this rush until you are back home from work. Your day can have all kind of unconscious treats of possible tension and stress. Rituals can then be effective to give you a level of certainty throughout the day where you know you can relax.

So how can you put your rituals in place? A first step is knowing what it is that gives you that feeling of just being you. just relaxed and something that is serving you without being reliant on someone else. A few examples are:

Read your kids a bedtime story to give them and yourself the transition time into the night/evening

Set a time to go the bed every night

Give yourself the gift of these little moments of self-nurturing, not because you have to, but just because you choose to have more control on how your day will unfold. To be able to have certain anchor points during the day that are designed to make you feel calm and joyful. But be careful! You can get addicted and never want to live without them ever again…